What is Link Building? (aka Backlinks)

Link Building is probably the 2nd most important factor in getting ranked well in the search engines after good, quality content.

What is a Backlink?

Link building also known as “getting backlinks”, involves getting links back to your website from other websites.

History of Backlinks?

The key with backlinks used to be getting lots of them from wherever you can.

Then it turned to getting backlinks just from “high authority” domains. These were websites that were considered authoritative. For example, in the SEO world, Moz is considered an authoritative website.

Later, it was about getting links from relevant websites. So, if you are a digital marketer, you would try and get links from a website like Raven Tools.

In time, it became about getting natural backlinks. So, getting 500 links in one day using some cheap service that blasts tens of thousands of websites in order to get you the 500 links would just be unnatural. Getting a few a day looks more reasonable. This is just one aspect on the natural backlinks.

In 2018 link building will be assessed by artificial intelligence, at least when you’re talking about Google.

Current Strategy for Link Building

This means that you shouldn’t bother with all the tricks and hacks that people have been writing about for years. Write good content and then market it the way any marketer would “normally” try.

If you’re an unknown site and then somehow get 20 backlinks from super high authority websites and that’s all, it just looks unnatural. Sophisticated search engines like Google may recognize this and not boost your results. Your money spent on that may have gone to waste.

What would a “normal” marketer do? Well, let’s say you’re writing a financial blog in Canada, specializing in mortgages. If you can get a link back from CMHC or one of the well known Canadian financial experts such as Gordon Pape, then go try and do that.

Don’t bother trying to get a link back from a bunch of unknown or unrelated websites with high page rank and hope it helps you.

Search engines such as Google want to serve their users content that satisfies their search. So, if you just create relevant content based on what your intended purpose is, that’s probably the most important thing you should do. There’s no tricks or hacks. Then do an SEO audit and fix and adjust your content.

One can argue you can do keyword research first, but, for the general business owner, that can be checked and changed after you’ve written the content you truly want to write about. Looking at keyword research first may lead you to write content that is unnatural. Just write what you want to write about.

After the content is written, then search out websites that may be interested in your content and look for linking opportunities. Link building involves a lot of research. It’s research into websites that are related to yours and that can use your content on their websites. It’s as simple as that.

There are lots of tutorials on link building on the web. Some are pretty long and you can tell a lot of work went into the design of the site. But, don’t be fooled by the pretty design. It’s really just research and outreach to bloggers, editors, and other website owners.